Writing
Removing Bottlenecks by Creating a User Interface for High Tech Processes
Hederis Blog
January 2, 2025
Introducing automation into your publishing processes can be a powerful way to reduce costs and increase speed, but when those automation tools can only be used by technical staff, you lose some of those efficiency benefits. When I worked with a publisher last year to automate some expensive processes, we controlled costs by creating the scripts first and launching those scripts with the publisher’s technical team to work out any kinks before expanding to their full staff. Now it was time to build a user interface (UI) and expand the automation tools rollout to the rest of the publisher’s team.
Empowering a 1-person publishing team with an automated production toolchain
Hederis Blog
October 8, 2024
A fairly well-established tech company approached me to help them build a workflow for their book publishing department, where they publish content related to their products and the larger tech ecosystem within which they belong. Their book division was undergoing a re-launch, and the initial plan was that it would be run by a single employee with the occasional help of other editors depending on the book topic. The challenge was to create a production workflow that could be run by one person and could scale as needed if their book business grew.
How I Built a Custom Tool to Automate a Comic Book Publisher’s Ebook Creation – and Save Them Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars
Hederis Blog
August 9, 2024
I had the great pleasure of helping a comics publisher automate their PDF-to-ebook conversion process. As both a big comics nerd and someone who loves a new automation challenge, this was a perfect fusion of my professional expertise and personal interests. The project started when the publisher’s technical expert reached out to me with an idea: they were currently spending a couple hundred bucks per book to convert from PDF to fixed-layout EPUB (the standard file format for comics ebooks) – a process that took one or two weeks at minimum. Could I help them automate that process, providing a massive reduction in costs and turnaround time? Yes Indeed!
Install Ruby with RVM on an M3 Pro Mac
Medium
November 8, 2023
Probably my most popular article, written after a frustrating afternoon of Googling to find a solution to this task, and my effort to spare other Mac developers from the same pain.
Automated Publishing Workflows, Explained
Medium
February 5, 2021
Automated book production and automated workflows have been a hot topic for years — certainly since before I got into the game — and have taken many forms. “XML/HTML-first” workflows, “single-source,” and the more recently popular “digital-first” are all variations of the same theme. To many people, while these terms clearly signal a “high tech” approach to publishing, the reality of the actual technology and the day-to-day impact remains a mystery. In this post, I attempt to remove some of that mystery by giving an introduction to what people usually mean when they talk about automated workflows and listing some of the pros and cons.
Hederis Documentation
Hederis
2018-2023
The complete documentation for the Hederis app.
Building a Slack Bot with Node.js to Query Channel History
Medium
February 4, 2016
Follow along with me as I learn how to build a Slack bot to help me track my tasks and to-do lists on the platform I use every day.
Building Books with CSS3
A List Apart
June 2, 2012
While historically, it's been difficult at best to create print-quality PDF books from markup alone, CSS3 now brings us the Paged Media Module, which targets print book formatting. "Paged" media exists as finite pages, like books and magazines, rather than as long scrolling stretches of text, like most websites. With a single CSS stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an ePub file. It's a lightweight and adaptable workflow, which gets you beautiful books faster. Nellie McKesson, eBook Operations Manager at O'Reilly Media, explains how to build books with CSS3.
Publishing with iBooks Author
Co-author: Adam Witwer
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
February 1, 2012
iBooks Author is the first tool of its kind. Never before have publishers, authors, and content creators had a tool for making dynamic, interactive ebooks in a WYSIWYG environment. This book is intended to get you up and writing in iBooks Author. You'll learn what to expect from this new tool and what its strengths and limitations are. You'll see how you can create beautifully designed pages and how you can bring those designs to life with interactive content in ways that, before now, were only possible in a web browser on the Internet. You'll also find out how to navigate the occasionally tricky terrain of Apple's ecosystem so that you can get your book published to the iBookstore.
Contributor to the Tools of Change Blog
...and along with EPUB 3: New CSS!
February 11, 2013
Simplifying and eliminating competing visual distractions for the reader
Responsive eBook Content
August 29, 2012
Responsive design isn't just for margins and font size; here's one way to rethink content display for multiple reading devices